As Hillary Clinton’s absence from the campaign trail continues, Donald Trump is attempting to use the opportunity to recast himself as a champion for working women.

But the Republican presidential candidate’s new pitch comes as Barack Obama, who is as popular as he has been since 2009, hit the campaign trail on behalf of his former secretary of state.

Trump will unveil his plans for government tax subsidies for childcare on Tuesday alongside his daughter Ivanka, as he attempts to claw back a historic poll deficit among white college educated women. Although his Republican predecessor Mitt Romney won that demographic by six points in 2012, Trump now trails Clinton by a margin of 50-40 points with this group, according to a recent Washington Post/ABC News poll.

Trump’s plan would allow childcare expenses to be tax-deductible for all individuals making under $250,000, up to the average cost of childcare in that person’s state, as well as expanding rebates for those who do not pay income taxes, through the earned income tax credit (EITC). His campaign declined to explain how this would be paid for, saying only that it would be part of a comprehensive tax reform and economic plan which would be revenue neutral.

The campaign also said Trump would announce a program to provide mothers with six weeks of paid maternity leave. The paid leave, which would provide these mothers unemployment insurance for six weeks as opposed to paying them their salaries, would be funded by reducing fraud in the current unemployment insurance program, the campaign said.

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Trump already has promised a significant tax cut as well as major increases in defense and infrastructure spending on the campaign trail without cutting spending on entitlements such as social security, Medicare and Medicaid.

In a rally in Iowa on Tuesday afternoon, Trump previewed his childcare plan, while also touching on familiar themes. The Republican nominee once again insisted that Clinton’s email scandal was “worse than Watergate” while talking ominously about bad trade deals influenced by “special interests”.

Trump told the crowd: “It’s almost like, I was thinking about it in the last couple of weeks in particular, they want these other countries to do so well ... because nobody can make deals that badly.”

Clinton unveiled a plan for universal preschool with increased federal funding in June 2015.

In a statement, the Clinton campaign cast scorn upon Trump’s proposal. Maya Harris, a senior policy advisor to the Democratic nominee, said: “The lack of seriousness of this proposal is no surprise given his history of disrespecting women in the workplace and the fact there’s no evidence he ever provided paid family leave or childcare to his own employees.”

The campaign went on to deride the proposed tax deductions as disproportionately favoring rich Americans as well as the inequity that Trump would only provide parental leave to mothers and not to fathers. Harris described it as “a regressive and insufficient ‘maternity leave’ policy that is out-of-touch, half-baked and ignores the way Americans live and work today”.

Hours before Trump was to make his pitch on childcare with daughter Ivanka in suburban Philadelphia, a former stronghold for moderate Republicans that has trended Democratic in recent years, Obama hit the trail for Clinton for the first time solo, downtown in the same city. The two appeared together in Charlotte, North Carolina, in July, their first joint event of the 2016 campaign.

In a spirited speech to thousands of supporters gathered under sunny skies, Obama attacked Trump for his praise for Vladimir Putin.

“I have to do business with Putin ... but I don’t go around saying that’s my role model,” the president said. “Can you imagine Ronald Reagan praising somebody like that? He saw America as a shining city on a hill. Donald Trump calls it a divided crime scene.”

The Republicans now represented “a dark, pessimistic vision, of a country where we turn against each other, we turn away from the rest of the world”, Obama said, adding that Trump was not qualified to be president in any way. He “says stuff every day that used to be considered disqualifying ... and yet because he says it over and over and over again, the press just gives up.”

No one could truly know what it would be like to be president “before you can sit behind that desk”, he said, but “the closest you can come to understanding what it’s like is to be where Hillary’s been”, he said, praising her work as his secretary of state.

Obama is among a cadre of top Democrats to campaign for Clinton this week, shifting the spotlight toward powerful surrogates who are both well positioned to make the case for the former secretary of state and boast of high favorability ratings with the American public. Clinton, who has been diagnosed with pneumonia, is currently taking a break from campaigning and is expected to return to the trail on Friday.

Vice-president Joe Biden stumped for Clinton on Monday in Charlotte, North Carolina, while Michelle Obama, whose speech at the Democratic national convention was roundly lauded, is expected to make her debut on the Clinton campaign trail in Virginia on Friday.

Barack Obama’s visit to the Pennsylvania battleground came as the president’s approval rating hit 58% – an eight-year high – in an ABC News/Washington Poll survey released on Monday. The president has enjoyed a steady uptick in his job approval in recent months, which could serve as a boon for Clinton and blunt Republican attacks that she is running for a “third Obama term”.

A packed schedule has nonetheless barred Obama from being a fixture on the campaign trail. As well as the appearance in Charlotte, the president has also headlined a series of fundraisers to help raise money for Democrats.

Obama can also prove influential in rallying core Democratic constituencies behind Clinton. While her standing remains strong among African American and Latino voters, Clinton continues to struggle among the young voters who twice turned out in record numbers to elect Obama. New data by SurveyMonkey found that Clinton is winning voters under the age of 25 by only 13 points, whereas Obama’s lead over Romney with that age group in 2012 was 29 points.

Off the trail, the two campaigns continued their back and forth over Clinton’s Friday comment that half of Trump’s voters belonged in a “basket of deplorables”.

Trump’s vice-presidential candidate Mike Pence, who declined to call former KKK leader and Trump backer David Duke deplorable in an interview on Monday, defended his statement to reporters on Tuesday morning. “I am not in the name calling business ... I am not going to validate the language that Hillary Clinton used,” said Pence.

“Hillary Clinton was not talking about that bad man; she was talking about people all across this country who are coming out in record numbers to stand with Donald Trump.”

Pence added of Duke: “I would draw no more conclusion from that man’s expressions of support than I would the fact that the father of a terrorist who killed 49 Americans was seen at a Hillary Clinton rally cheering her on.”

The Indiana governor made those remarks after meeting with House Republican leaders on Capitol Hill where he insisted that his fellow party members were presenting a united front in November: “There is consistency between Donald Trump’s vision ... and the agenda of House Republicans.

“You are going to have, in a majority party, occasional differences of opinion, but our goals are the same,” he told reporters in the lobby of the Republican National Committee headquarters.

“We feel the wind at our backs,” added House speaker Paul Ryan, who has frequently been critical of Trump. “We are offering an agenda to show how we can get this country back on top.”

However, Pence’s Democratic counterpart, Tim Kaine, hit back in a campaign stop in Michigan on Tuesday, saying: “If you are chumming around with the head of the Klu Klux Klan, people who have that title, that’s deplorable,” said the Virginia senator.

For all the recriminations, the next pivotal moment in the campaign is likely to happen on September 26 when the first debate will be held Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York. It is scheduled to occur the same day that the FBI will unveil statistics showing a major spike in murders, giving a boost to one of Trump’s major talking points.